Lifco Dental — Service with a smile

With IBS Enterprise in place, medical equipment supplies company Lifco Dental is speeding up orders and deliveries for dentists throughout the Nordic region

If you live in the Nordic region and visited your local dentist recently, there is a high probability that the materials your dentist used on you were delivered by Lifco Dental AB. The customers of this leading wholesaler of dental products and equipment consist of more than 25,000 dentists, located in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the Baltic countries. Lifco Dental, which is one of seven business areas in the Lifco industrial group, provides logistic services for the companies in the Dental Products business area. The company runs its logistic services out of a 4,000 square-meter central storage warehouse located in Enköping, Sweden, and a large addition is underway.

Standardization needed

Lifco Dental has been using IBS solutions since 1997 and as Managing Director Per Arosenius says, “the company was due for a much needed upgrade.” He explains: “We needed a more standardized system to keep up with new technologies and went live with Enterprise 6 as scheduled without any direct problems. The system worked as expected, with just minimal adjustments. But there is still some fine tuning to be done before it is perfect,” says Arosenius.

Shortly after the upgrade, Lifco Dental merged with Finnish Oriola Dental. As a result, Lifco Dental now has up to 130,000 order lines monthly. Arosenius points out that the upgraded solution helped them to successfully move stock from the Finnish company to Sweden. He says it also gives them huge potential to save costs and get a quicker return on investment.

Supply Chain specialists

Lifco Dental was happy with its existing IBS solution, so when it came time to choose a new system or an upgrade, Arosenius says they had no qualms about remaining with IBS and installing the latest Enterprise 6 solution. “It was a natural step to continue to use the IBS solution and to do the upgrade with them. It’s easier to understand when you have the same base and functionality with a new system. If we had chosen another competitor, we would definitely have had some problems with data interpretation. But we were already comfortable with the IBS system and IBS consultants.” However, as with most changes, there were a few issues, he says. “I believe there are a few glitches in the system design, but we are discussing this with IBS developers to solve the problem. As well as being supply chain specialists, IBS are good listeners and strive to achieve 100 percent customer satisfaction.” Lifco Dental’s IBS Enterprise 6 solution includes sales order management through distribution, service management and financials.

Multi Distribution Centre

The IBS solution includes a fully integrated Multi Distribution Centre (MDC) module which allows Lifco Dental to create a dynamic and flexible product supply within the group. This includes automatic internal order handling for when deliveries of global and regional products are made between different legal companies. The software automatically performs inter-company order handling, invoicing, distribution and financial transactions between the companies.

Lifco Dental has also installed IBS Planner View - a powerful and adaptable PC-based, graphical planning and information management tool that provides real-time supply chain visibility. IBS Planner View enables the company to collect, manage, present and use information from multiple servers, database management systems, companies, applications and software releases – all into one common interface.

With 6,000 order lines daily and a 96 % service level of delivery within 24 hours in the Nordic region, Arosenius says the company needs an efficient system in its warehouse to not only handle outgoing order lines, but also incoming ones from its over 500 suppliers worldwide. “The IBS solution has great potential and I would definitely recommend it to the other business areas within our group,” he concludes.